I uh, finished the Balan Wonderworld Demo.
I have a lot of critiques.
First of all the game seems strangely low budget. Animations for everyone except the main character is incredibly smooth but the moment to moment gameplay suffers because of how stiff he is. And yet the Cinematics are VERY well done. Like top notch stuff you’d expect to see from Square-Enix. So there’s this weird disconnect.
My second, biggest, and last critique is... this game seems like a relic of the past. The platforming is weird and seems very elementary, like something you’d see out of a old 3D platformer for PS1 or N64. The whole foundation of collecting costumes to traverse the world is an interesting concept but some just seem kind of not fleshed out. The dragon one in particular is weird because, since you literally only use 1 button to play and every button does the same thing, you can’t jump. The whole thing feels rather restricting because you can only do certain things and you can only carry 3 costumes at a time but the world is built around using EVERY costume. Something I also noticed is that if you lose a costume in a level by dying there’s no way to get it back without restarting or finishing the level.
All things considered I’m actually disappointed in the game so far. Maybe things will change as I dive deeper into the demo but right now... it just seems dull. Everything besides the cool character designs and shifting scenery is just rather dull sadly.
Edit: Ok so apparently this demo is longer than I thought so I’m not quite done with it. Will update it after I actually finish it lol